Blow it Up: A Plan for Lincoln Center

 --  By Tom Phillips 

                                    

With the Holidays just around the corner, box offices were open today at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the place was buzzing with...construction noise.  Philharmonic (now Geffen) Hall is being gutted again, with a scaled-down plan for renovation.  Across 66th Street the Juilliard School is also getting some kind of a makeover.

I have a better idea for fixing Lincoln Center. With federal infrastructure money flowing in to rebuild New York neighborhoods, try this: 

Blow it up. Tear it down. Bury it.  

The destruction of a working-class neighborhood to make way for Lincoln Center in the early 1960s was the biggest bad idea in the history of New York as cultural capital of the world.  Conceived by empire-building Rockefellers and executed by power-broker Robert Moses, Lincoln Center was designed to renew a decaying city, to reverse "white flight" by attracting middle-brow audiences to the city's unparalleled music, dance and theatre. 

Artists, entrepreneurs and educators were initially attracted by the posh facilities, designed to replace their cramped quarters at places like City Center, Carnegie Hall and the old Met.  But with the possible exception of the Met, the arts suffered in their new environs. Philharmonic Hall was an acoustic horror show. The New York State Theater allowed New York City Ballet plenty of extra dancing room -- but productions designed for City Center lost some of their charm on an oversized floorspace.  The party scene in George Balanchine's "Nutcracker" is supposed to be in a living room, but this set was the size of a high-school gym. Act Two is supposed to be in a box of candy, not a walk-in refrigerator.  (The new stage cut both ways -- "Square Dance" lost its down-home feel, but Balanchine had room to create "Vienna Waltzes.") 

Meanwhile New York City Opera -- forced to share a theater with the ballet -- was baffled by the acoustics of a hall built for sight-lines instead of sound.  Founded by a Mayor who believed in grand opera for the masses, it turned in despair to microphones and musical theater, then gave up the ghost.  

Taste suffered as companies strained to attract a bourgeois audience. The Philharmonic drifted into classical pops, and even tried to showcase individual orchestra members in an ensemble devoted to collective sound.  City Ballet's elegant neo-classic culture crumbled after the death of Balanchine in 1983. Cynically, it then tried to market its dancers as athletes, or fashion models, or soft-core porn.  That last image became reality in a 2018 lawsuit over dancers' tawdry sex videos.    

Meanwhile the whole Lincoln Center enterprise had gone upscale.  Built by the city and state as a magnet for the middle class, the place was renovated starting in 2006 as a playground for the One Percent.  The New York State Theater was rebuilt and re-christened the David H. Koch Theater. 

The billion-dollar makeover featured an orgastic fountain designed by an LA architect, and a high-end restaurant overlooking the reflecting pool.  Public benches around the pool were removed.  Ticket prices went through the roof. 

That's when I learned about demonstrating at Lincoln Center. Protest is against the rules (!) in this privately-run public space, secured by surveillance and private guards.  The atmosphere of repression is symbolized by the Koch Theater, named for a donor whose faked interest in the arts provides cover for his project of sabotaging democracy. This is why even "edgy" productions here seem toothless, hopelessly co-opted. 

Last year, in the uproar that followed the police killing of George Floyd, Lincoln Center announced a "commitment" to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  Since then they have added persons of color to their senior management and board, and interns training to be future leaders. Programming for 2021-2022 includes a smattering of works by or about persons of color, with more commissioned for future years. Ticket prices are being examined with an eye toward "expanding access."  And Lincoln Center says it will publicly document the story of its origins.  

All that is fine. But the question remains:   

Can an ugly arts center, built on the ruins of a Black and Hispanic neighborhood, anchored by oversized theaters from an age when opera and symphony were civic staples, supported by premium  ticket prices and the largess of billionaires, which disallows free speech and honors the nation's leading advocate of King Coal and white rule --- can such an institution remake itself to thrive in an age of anti-racism, environmentalism, experimental art and revolutionary ideas?   

Give them a year or two to try.  And if not, here's my idea -- actually a modified version of demolition:  

Leave the Met where it is, and eventually turn it into a museum or mausoleum. Make Damrosch Park what it was in past summers -- a place for free or low-cost music and dance. In the interest of education, leave the Library, Juilliard and the School of American Ballet in place.  Tear the rest down and build affordable housing. Invite artists to live and work among ordinary New Yorkers. Rename 66th Street Jane Jacobs Way.  

Send the orchestra to Carnegie Hall, and the ballet to Brooklyn. 

A big job?  It's a big town.  As Rupert Murdoch likes to say--- bury your mistakes. 

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips